Oriana Fallaci: The Force of Reason

Review: 44 of 45 helpful votes; the review was erased from amazon.com by a certain movement

Oriana Fallaci, a famous journalist and former antifascist partisan, offers her fascinating views on Islam, its history, and the threats facing the Western civilization as well as her personal story that has become even more striking after the 9/11 attacks. For security reasons, Fallaci had to move to America, a country she views as the main hope of the Western civilization, and so do I, a citizen of the Czech Republic.

During the last years, she became the target of many fanatical Muslims and their fatwas as well as their left-wing allies who have made her life in Italy virtually impossible: her identification with Master Cecco, a victim of the inquisition, is certainly justified. But it was cancer that ultimately killed this extraordinary woman last week.

Much like Fallaci, I count myself as a Christian atheist. As most scientists, I appreciate the tough struggles between science and Christianity in which the Church was wrong. Nevertheless, these old disputes seem rather subtle in comparison with the outrageous recent attacks against the main principles underlying the Western civilization, including the power of reason and arguments as opposed to violence and intimidation. Why were the controversies relatively subtle?

As the Pope Benedict XVI, who privately met Fallaci a few months before she died, recently explained in Regensburg, the God of Christianity is restricted by His own words and by the laws of logic and mathematics. Allah is not restricted by anything and his followers are not restricted either. They will do anything to spread their beliefs. This fact is magnified by the ambiguous relation between the Quran and violence. Fallaci explains in detail how the Muslim clerics in Europe - a part of the future Eurabia - teach their believers that they shouldn't be restricted by the local laws.

Fallaci writes that the threat that the whole Western civilization faces is amplified by the political correctness and by multicultural utopists many of whom have openly become the fifth column of jihad. I have just read a shameful anti-papal (and anti-Fallaci) article in the Guardian and it looks really scary where we seem to be going.

As Fallaci convincingly argues, the presence of Islam in the West is directly proportional to our loss of freedom. Her personal experience is captivating but it is not really new to me because I have been exposed to remotely comparable kind of pressure. Everyone who advocates a principle that is inconvenient for various groups of people that are presented as "suppressed groups" and especially for their inferior ideologies - even though these ideologies are really starting to control our lives - is immediately hated by a certain segment of the society and labelled as a racist. I know these things extremely well and it was refreshing to read stories from someone with a similar attitude.

This new book as well as Fallaci's example should wake up millions of people and make them realize that if they won't actively try to defend the Western values against the pressure of an Asian religion and against the cancer of political correctness, the civilization as we know it could face a genuine risk of destruction.